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De Klerk was no hero

By Imraan Buccus

Today, February 2nd, 28 years ago, the course of South African history was altered. FW de Klerk certainly did not take a suicidal leap of faith on February 2, 1990 because he wanted to change the course of history.

There was just too much happening around him. The country was in flames. The late 1980s saw the apartheid state plunged into its deepest crisis ever. Revolution was knocking.

Hundreds of thousands of all races were taking to the streets in a mass democratic movement.

Apartheid laws were routinely flouted forcing the authorities to either relent or turn a blind eye.
The country wobbled on the precipice of ungovernability.
The former National Party was in complete disarray.

PW Botha, the “Groot Krokodil”, under whose watch the tentative overtures were being made to the then incarcerated Nelson Mandela and exiled ANC, was ousted. The new leadership under De Klerk was hardly enlightened.

In fact many pondered why De Klerk had not earlier gone with Andries Treurnicht’s “verkrampte” bloc into the Conservative Party.
One can surmise that the puppet masters on Diagonal Street, Wall Street, in Whitehall and Washington DC had some ideas.
Big business and apartheid’s traditional supporters in the councils of the world were willing to hedge their bets on De Klerk, despite the fact that sanctions and disinvestment were biting. Capital was in flight.

Outspan oranges were rotting in the warehouses. Fine Cape wines were being turned back from ports like Dublin, Rotterdam and Le Havre.
Krugerrands were stockpiling in the South African Mint. Thousands of South African whites were cutting and running to places like Perth and Toronto.
White mothers, Afrikaner and English, were receiving their sons in body bags from the border.
They were seeing through Pretoria’s tales about the noble, Christian war being waged against the so-called black communist terrorists.
The “verligte” among their ranks were heading to talks with the ANC in Dakar and other capitals on the continent.

The apartheid state was a diplomatic polecat with its ambassadors forced to turn tail and head home unwanted and unloved.
The ANC and to a lesser extent the Pan Africanist Congress were gaining respectability in the capitals of the world, with their chief representatives elevated to the status of ambassadors.
One would have hoped that Robin Renwick, former British ambassador in Pretoria and nowadays styled as Thatcherite Baron Renwick of Clifton, would have had a more revealing word or two to say.
His recently released book, Mission to South Africa, is a damp squib for those seeking the inside track from an outsider on the events of February 2 1990.

Renwick was former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s troubleshooter in South Africa and Namibia. He would have us believe he was close to the action as the transition unfolded.
Hardly any revelations unfold in the book. Instead he paints a halo above De Klerk, shamelessly airbrushing an important period in history. The cynic among those in the know will gladly reveal that Renwick overstates his teas with Thabo Mbeki and secret meetings with Oliver Tambo.
What he does reveal is the enormous faith that Thatcher placed in De Klerk as a man she could trust.
His latter-day prophecy (apparently to Thatcher) that no solution to the crisis of apartheid was possible without the ANC is, to use the language of another admirer of Thatcher, poppycock.

Both sides of the Atlantic were deeply antagonistic to black majority rule in South Africa.
One need not scratch too deeply in the official statements to discern that. As the 1980s drew to a close, De Klerk was up against the ropes clutching at the wobbly lifeline thrown from London and Washington.
Internal insurrection was at its peak. The armed insurgency was scoring huge propaganda victories even if its actual military capacity was limited.
De Klerk was not looking for a Nobel Peace Prize. He was looking to defend the interests of big business and, to put it crudely, whatever vestiges of white privilege that could be.

The ANC also faced a conundrum. Thirty years underground, in exile and in jail were taking their toll.
The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the unbundling of the Soviet Union all but put paid to a bulwark of financial, military and diplomatic support.
Former Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was slashing a political swathe with perestroika and glasnost. The old world was changing and very fast.

If the ANC ignored De Klerk’s overtures, it risked losing control of a runaway transition from authoritarian rule to an as yet unknown alternative.
The rest of the story has been told in countless volumes.
Looking back 25 years, there is no amount of revisionist claptrap that can take away the fact that De Klerk was marched into the transition kicking and screaming.

He is an accidental icon under a chipped halo.

Buccus is Al Qalam editor, research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and academic director of an overseas study program on political transformation.